Saturday, January 31, 2015

This segment on WAMC's Roundtable offers a good explanation of why the “Affordable Care Act” has done
little to make health care more affordable. Lots of people in the industry have
made out like bandits in recent years. Spoiler alert: those who actually treat
patients – doctors and nurses – are not among them.

Brill offers a great anecdote of him presenting an
explanation of benefits letter to the CEO of his health insurance company and
the CEO being unable to explain what it means. This is not what
happens in any kind of rational industry.

Until we decide to implement Medicare for All, which removes the profit-motive for those who are nothing but money changers, our sick care system will be a mess.

Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy
against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this
national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed
as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more
broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire
from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the
Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal
segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did
not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward
another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign,
where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable
wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor
people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to
rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed
segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained
miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south
remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to
sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of
the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights'
issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another
lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War
and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam
speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why
opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his
activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and
angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that
Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have
tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my
conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent
action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They
asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve
its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit
home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my
own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this
government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our
violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill,
to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And
King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other
economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since,
he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and
human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young
people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of
conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal
equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people
into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was
the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the
voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for
no document from human hands can make these humans any less our
brothers.

About Me

The author is a freelance writer and journalist who lives in upstate New York. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Guinea (Conakry), West Africa, in the mid-90s. He is also fluent in French.
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L'auteur est un journaliste et écrivain qui habite le nord de l'Etat de New York. Il fut volontaire professeur de maths au sein du Corps de la Paix américain; il serva en République de Guinée (Conakry) en Afrique de l'Ouest dans les années 90.